Anchorz Field

What’s translated

• All 843 of the game’s text strings: the campaign, the adviser’s and commander’s battle dialogue, every rival crew, the rules and tutorials, menus, lists, anchor and machine descriptions, results and options.
• The five illustrated intro story pages, re-set in English.
• Graphics: the list screen’s Sort button and the FIRE!! sound effect in the intro are redrawn.
• Left as in the original: the katakana above the title logo (the logo itself already reads ANCHOR FIELD).

Names: your nation is Sharvan; the rivals are Baltz, Bujina, Gibros, Santo Principe, Libitenstainer, Galgis and the Mu Empire. The 27 field names are puns on real places and stay romanised as written. The anchors are the Normal, Chute and Roller Anchors, with “Charge” for the explosive payloads (M Charge, LL Charge, Buster Charge…). The rival crews keep their gimmicks: one crew speaks stereotyped “Chinese” Japanese in the original, rendered as broken English; another makes Russian-style puns, kept as English puns of the same kind; the muffled and the gurgling crews say “Mmph mmph” and “Blub blub”. The original’s joke about “made from concentrate” (濃縮還元) is kept.

How it was made: AI translation, independent checks, human decisions

• Claude translated the script directly from the Japanese in the ROM. The whole script is kana with no kanji, so every line needed careful reading. Claude also did all the hacking: a new variable-width text engine, pointers, labels and the intro pages.
• A second, independent Claude reviewer checked every line against the Japanese. A polish pass followed, with each change checked against the Japanese by a separate verifier. A final separate review read the whole patch again (44 lines fixed), and a mechanics check made sure numbers the game writes into the text still land in the right place.
• Every string was rendered in an emulator with every glyph logged: no overflow and no leftover Japanese. A random walk through the game from several save points found no Japanese reaching the screen, and the campaign was played past the first battle with every printed line logged.
• The judgement calls were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading and the options, and I decided each one by hand: names, the stereotyped accents, the puns, wording in fixed-size boxes, and which art to keep.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan ROM itself.
• Font: a proportional pixel font drawn for this project.

How to patch

Apply anchorz-field-en-1.0.bps to the Japanese ROM “Anchorz Field (Japan)” (CRC32 425EB893) with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS. The result should be CRC32 34A7D483.

The ROM keeps its size (1 MB). It’s a WonderSwan (mono) game, so keep the .ws extension.

You must provide your own copy of the original Japanese game to apply it.

Download: anchorz-field-en-1.0.bps on the release page.

Known issues

• It hasn’t been played start to finish by a person. If you find leftover Japanese, cut text or a crash, please tell me where it happened.
• A few rarely seen screens (conquering a nation, some item messages) weren’t reached in normal play.
• “★Special Stage” is missing its closing star. The original is missing it too, and it was kept that way on purpose.

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The game drew text in fixed-width cells. A new variable-width text engine (8086 assembly) fits the English into the original boxes without changing their size.
• Strings are relocated into free ROM space and the game’s pointers updated; numbers the game prints into text keep their original positions.
• The intro story pages are pictures: they were redrawn with the English set in the game’s small font.